


New Fealties

by May



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Masturbation, Other, Tears
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-29
Updated: 2014-07-29
Packaged: 2018-02-11 00:05:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2045328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/May/pseuds/May
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I don’t motherfucking care. I am the one what got to be pushing what I was to know on all together like grubpaste. The bits of it don’t matter.”</p>
<p>Before you can stop him, he pushes his pants down to his knees.</p>
            </blockquote>





	New Fealties

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Bonus Round 5 of HSWC 2014.

Gamzee‘s facepaint should not be smeared in the way that it is. It seems like smudging as the result of exertion, at first. You don’t even really hold to that – it’s his mask, the presentation of his piety. Since Gamzee did not have the fullest of indoctrinations like you did, he probably doesn’t bother sealing his paint properly.

Then you notice the paint on his arms, smeared down in the dip of his forearm from the hollow of his elbow. It’s probably thoughtlessness that provoked him into taking a careless wipe of his arm across his face (some clowns do this at four or five and even six, though you never did). Then, you see the scratches on his face, the blood sliding like a fealty in itself. This is him after everything has burst. Cruel and sad.

The doll stares at you as he hugs it to his chest. You don’t stare back because it’s not your place. You catch Gamzee’s eyes, instead, and he narrows them at you. He snarls as his fingers clench around the doll’s arms. He shows you his teeth, large and neatly sharp. Though it doesn’t really matter that you can’t run your tongue around your own ragged gums.

His eyes turn upwards, and he follows the curve of your right horn, resting on its tip for a moment. There’s no brightness of realisation there, no spark where he notices them as his. The brightness was only chemical, you think. But it’s like somebody reached into his ragged pan and found the right button to press to close the brightness off. You wonder how early the blankness would have set in if it wasn’t for intoxication

-Actually, you know, because, as you watched from the bubbles, your Lord’s servant didn’t always do his bidding as wanted, and often had to go back and untangle her mistakes, anyway-

but you’re not sure what there is to say about innocence, anyway – whole and smoothly pure before it breaks. The cracks can be necessary, though.

“You gonna get on to be speaking in motherfucking riddles?” Gamzee looks you in the eye, his fingers curling around the arm of the puppet. His quiet voice patters in the gloom before he yells. “Because I ain’t got no answers waiting here for you.”

He pauses and smirks. “No, actually, in motherfucking fact, I got all the answers.”

He shifts the puppet where it sits on his crossed legs and its head sags, the glass stare shifting upwards a little. You still defer from it. Gamzee stares at you, chewing on his naked lip.

“You might have the motherfucking answers, oh bard of rage, but your paint is in a state of motherfucking heretical disarray,” you say, straight into his pan. He cringes, but doesn’t jump. Things don’t matter so much, it seems. “I can fix it.”

It comes as an afterthought, the image of your fingers slipping over his cheeks, still round with youth. The thought knocks on your memories. But what would the Lord say to a clown without his paint?

(You find out later that it’s the same thing that he would say to anybody else)

 

His lip curling in dismay, Gamzee stares at you. His eyes take you in, skimming over you. His mouth turns to a sardonic smile, then, before he drags his fingers across his cheek. Underneath his fingertips, his paint bunches, and he doesn’t break eye contact.

With a light, slow kind of grace – not a muscle out of place, he sticks out his tongue and smears the paint across it. He lets it hang out of his mouth for a moment, deep grey, paint wetly smeared across it. His teeth above that are bared in a snarling grimace.

There’s an anger solidifying inside you, smooth and unappreciatively fresh. You know where he is in his journey, but how dare he? How dare he. Gamzee rests back on his palms, the puppet slipping and going slack between his legs. He curls up his tongue, paint and all, and pulls back into his mouth. He swallows, his face pinching in a grimace.

“For your motherfucking heresy, Bro.” He grins, and you can see the grainy off-white of the paint along his bone shard teeth. “It don’t motherfucking matter, ‘cause the point is that all of those things that I got to be doing are not enriched in the motherfucking righteousness as I thought they were to be.”

It makes sense because he’s burning everything to make the new. There’s a big patch of bare skin on Gamzee’s cheek, smooth and grey. You could touch it, feel the cells that make up that youthful plushness shift. You think that you’d probably get to feel the pain of his teeth in conjunction with it, though.

“It’s about respect, brother,” you say. Gamzee leans back on his hands and grimaces, the rise and fall of his chest catching on the foulness of the taste. He looks at you like you’re some old priest spouting the virtues of morning fasting. “It’s all about the motherfucking holiest of presentation. Ain’t no other troll with a face on.”

You don’t actually know why you want to defend it so much, but something inside you can’t stand to see paraphernalia strewn across the dirt.

“I don’t motherfucking care.” Gamzee pushes himself up and then slides his hands beneath the waistband of his pants. The puppet falls to the side, onto its face. “I don’t motherfucking care. I am the one what got to be pushing what I was to know on all together like grubpaste. The bits of it don’t matter.”

Before you can stop him, he pushes his pants down to his knees. He has sleek, bony hips and the crease of his sheath is exposed, but it’s not concupiscent in any way that you’re used to. Again, Gamzee makes eye-contact with you and, again, he drags his fingers slowly across his face, gathering a large hunk of paint. He stares at it, his hand trembling slightly, then he moves quickly so that his fingers are clawed between his skinny thighs.

Your stomach gives an unpleasantly biological drop after sweeps of being settled as a ghost. The paint lands with a splat between his legs and you just watch. You’ve watched for sweeps, so you can continue to do it. Gamzee jumps a little in surprise when the paint hits, but not for long.

The paint is thick enough that it covers his closed sheath, but you watch his fingers spread and smear it, and the crease becomes a shadow. You look to his face, and he’s snarling, baring his teeth, his brow crossed in concentration.

His fingers push at the paint on his groin and you’re caught on noticing that it’s grainy and greyed, and the sliver of purple that doesn’t take long to become visible takes you by surprise. Gamzee whimpers, high and grating, in the back of his throat. His sheath begins to split and the purple flesh inside is sensitive and delicate, and he outright whines when the paint smears across it.

He sinks to his knees, his limbs folding in their collapse. He shakes, and, the paint smeared against his inner thighs and along the new line of his nook. Your annoyance has become warm in your gut, uncomfortable. Gamzee continues to massage the paint into his groin, his bulge beginning to slip out, catching paint along its glistening length.

His face screws up as he does this, his teeth making indentations on his bottom lip, and the exposed skin where the paint used to be is flushed purple. He drags himself out of that for a moment and makes eye contact with you, again. His eyes are yellow slits and he growls. An awkward shift of his legs and he’s on his knees, and this gives him a free hand to flip his middle finger in your direction.

“How’s this motherfucking blasphemy, motherfucker?” he breathes, and you meet his eyes steadily for a moment before you take a deep breath. A memory, attached to something odd. And nothing you want with your bard.

You watch his slim bulge snake around his fingers, catching paint. Suddenly, Gamzee shudders, his eyes wide, as he falls onto his front, again. You think he’s been taken by the sensation of it, but then he gives a shiver, and there’s another grimace. Used, grimy facepaint, you guess, is uncomfortable when it gets stuck in the fluid ducts on the underside of his bulge.

Looking at you, though, he pulls himself back onto his knees and continues what he was doing. He gives a loud snarl, gathering paint from his thighs and pushing clumps of it into his nook. You can see, when he twists the right way, that he’s spread wide enough to allow several fingers to enter. He’s flexible enough that he can get his own fingers inside himself down to the knuckle. His eyes fix on the ceiling, then, bright and wide. He can get his hand in that far, but that doesn’t mean it’s comfortable.

Your pan fixes on the sheer heresy of what he’s doing, again, but it’s stretched beyond the small, micro frustrations that once hampered you in your group of friends. That it is the bard is the worst part of it, and it makes parts of your ghost react in ways that it hasn’t been able to for sweeps and sweeps.

Speaking of stretched, though, Gamzee, hunched over and not even facing you anymore, arches his back. He makes a strained whine in the back of his throat –and that makes something inside you that you didn’t even know existed at all twist and ache- and then, as the drip of fluid starts, he tumbles, still trembling.

You watch his back rise and fall in ragged breaths, and you see the sweat bead on his skin. Strange things that he does without thinking, not being dead. And, of course, fluid sticky between his thighs, mingled with paint.

He pulls himself upright into a kneeling position, again, and looks at you, his expression neutral for a moment, before he looks down at himself, at the smeared purple and white.

“Was it motherfucking worth it?”

His shoulders don’t shake out of laughter, you realise, as tears drop into the mass between his legs, small, thin pools in the thick mess.

“I don’t motherfucking got my knowing of that,” he says, his voice small, cracking. He scoops up the puppet again, holding it to his chest and well above the mess he’s made. “It motherfucking pains me to get my wear on of it, but also not to.”

You nod and join him, kneeling next to him. Helping him ready his paint, you think, is another thing that you can do before he goes out there to complete his tasks.


End file.
